The Nigerian telecommunications industry has lost $3 billion to call masking, Professor Umar Danbatta, Executive Vice Chairman, Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, said.
He said those responsible for the nefarious act have managed to use a small box called SIM box that enables them to bypass legal call routes without getting tracked.
Danbatta, who stated this Thursday in Lagos at the 85th telecoms consumer parliament in Lagos, said Sim box was one of the most prevalent frauds in the telecom industry, causing it to lose estimated $3 billion revenue.
He, however, promised that the commission would soon round them up, having acquired a technology that would detect wherever SIM box was used in the country.
He said the enormity of loss the menace has caused the industry was the main reason the commission deliberately themed this edition of TCP “Overcoming Challenges of Call Masking /Refiling: Task Ahead for the Telecoms Industry.”
Danbatta, who was represented by Mrs. Felicia Onwegbuchulam, the Director, Consumer Affairs Bureau, described call masking/refilling as a situation where international call is terminated in Nigeria as a local number with ulterior motive of profiting from price differentials between international and local calls termination rates.
He said: “Call masking is a worrisome development that constitutes serious challenges not only to the telecom industry but also possess serious security threats to the entire country.
“As a commission, we have discovered that call masking is being perpetrated with small movable devices called SIM box, which are electronic boxes loaded with SIM Numbers.
“A SIM box has capacity to receive and transmit calls undetected. The challenge is that these SIM boxes are never type-approved by the commission, a clear indication that they are being used illegally in the country”.
As part of the commission’s effort to fight the menace, Danbatta said NCC, in collaboration with stakeholders, had held a series of meeting which led to the suspension of six indicted interconnect exchange licensees in February, 2018.
He added that the regulator barred about 750, 000 numbers assigned to 13 operators from the national network, as a way of expressing the commission’s zero tolerance to communications fraud in the industry.
Earlier, in his welcome address, Alhaji Ismail Adedigba, Deputy Director, Consumer Affairs Bureau, NCC, said the choice of the topic is apt because the Commission has been inundated with complaints by telecom consumers and other industry stakeholders on the rising wave of call masking /refilling, which he said poses security and economic risks to the country.
He said: ”Apart from the economic losses and anti-competitive proclivities arising from call masking/refilling practice, of great concern is the security implications which masked calls pose to our country, at a time the Federal Government is keen on addressing diverse security challenges in the country”.
